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Holiday greetings to all our friends around the world! Down/up here on Aconcagua it has been a Christmas to remember. We went on an acclimatization hike towards C1, enjoyed a favorite mountain holiday tradition of quesadillas a la Leon, and generally enjoyed each other's company. Tomorrow we will ride the (hopefully) improving trend of decreasing winds and try to carry up to Camp 1. Our time spent at BC prepares us for strength on the upper mountain and we look forward to making the most of it. Here are a few shout outs from the team: "Feeling great! Love you all. MUAT baby." "Merry Christmas family and friends. Love from 14,000 feet." "Love you family! #2, wish you were here! Love you, #1" "Jeanne, Love you." "Merry Christmas Fam!" "Adi, having a great time. See you soon. Do your homework-love, Dad" "Vien, all I want for X-mad is you." A few of us might have been napping, but rest assure we all miss our people and can't wait to share this adventure when we return. RMI Guide Jake Beren

On The Map

Our Four Day Summit Climb team led by Mike Walter and Five Day Summit Climb team led by Seth Waterfall made it to the summit of Mt. Rainier today. The teams reported clear skies above 6,000’ and light winds from the west. The teams have started their descent and are en route to Camp Muir. Congratulations to today's summit climbers!

Sunday, June 22, 2025 - 9:30 pm PT

Forecasts weren’t great for today, but when we looked out in the morning, the actual weather wasn’t bad. We packed up and got our spikes on by 8:20AM to begin working up Motorcycle Hill. It was great to be climbing in crampons and using an ice axe again. We took our first rest break in the middle of Squirrel Hill and our second in the Polo Field just under the end of the West Buttress. It was a little breezy, but since temps weren’t very cold it wasn’t at all uncomfortable.

Most of our day was spent in brilliant sunshine with blue sky, while clouds filled in below us. Windy Corner wasn’t particularly windy, and the travel conditions were good, so we made it to our cache target of 13,500 feet in four hours. We did a bit of hard digging to keep our things safe from ravens.  After one last look at the great South Peak of Mt. McKinley (our destination) we dropped back around the corner and had an easy climb down to Camp at 11k. The final 30 minutes was in a mild whiteout as we descended into the clouds. 

The round trip was a pretty respectable 6 hours and got us back in plenty of time for a restful afternoon while it snowed lightly on our tents. Fingers crossed for moving weather tomorrow as we would like to get to 14k camp.  

- RMI Guide Dave Hahn

Whether training, or on your next climb, your feet are your Achilles heel.  If you develop blisters, banged up toes, or pain in your feet or joints, the whole process of climbing comes to a grinding halt.  While training for your climb, you’ll put in countless days with heavy weight on your back, countless miles of trail and rough terrain, and many, many hours on your feet.  Taking good care of your feet and giving them proper support  through all of this training can help to minimize a lot of overuse injuries, and leave you feeling better for your upcoming climb.  Get yourself a good pair of orthotics or at least a good supportive footbed for your training footwear and climbing boots.   Our leg alignment can change dramatically throughout our life, often as a result of changes in the structure of the foot.  These changes in alignment, when you are in the midst of a heavy training load, can leave you with joint pain and a tendency towards persistent overuse injuries that can stick around and have a major impact on your training.  Orthotics are often the best solution for fixing your alignment and keeping those injuries from cropping up.  An orthotist can mold a footbed to help your alignment stay nearer the ideal.  This helps your knees track straighter, joints stack over each other better, and femurs rotate in the hip socket more smoothly.   Many climbers rent boots for their climb.  While rental boots are well made, high-end brands, they are not broken in to your foot.  A custom orthotic or an aftermarket footbed such as “superfeet” is the best way to make that boot feel as though it has always been on your foot.  With the long days climbing up and down Rainier, or weeks on the glaciers of Denali, that extra comfort and support can be a major boon to enjoying the experience.   In the last several years, there has been a lot of support for the idea of running in very low support shoes that mimic what it would be like to run barefoot.  While studies do support the idea that this is better for your body when running or walking, the heavy loads that we put on our backs and the stiff to nearly rigid soles of the boots that we wear when training and climbing all demand that we support our feet.  Look into your alignment and footbed needs and find your way to more comfortable climbing and training! Questions? Comments? Share your thoughts here on the RMI Blog!

Greetings everyone! This is Mike Uchal from the June 19th Denali Expedition with Adam Knoff, Zeb Blais, and team. We are celebrating the 4th of July here at 17,000’ with fresh coffee and great group stories. We are being proactive at fighting an impossible tent-bound fever with short jaunts outside and hot meals in our group tent, when the weather allows. We’ll continue to play this now mental game as we continue to wait for our weather window for our summit attempt. Please stay tuned Lower 48 and happy 4th of July to all of our friends and family from our team here at 17000’. Good bye. RMI Guide Mike Uchal

Evening all,

We did it, we flew onto the glacier! Today is a hurry to wait kind of day. In order to be the first to fly, we were the first in line for coffee. On our way to coffee we saw a fox on the railroad tracks. The last time I summited Denali, I saw a fox before flying. So I think this is a good omen. We shall see. Any who, with caffeine surging through our bodies we are ready to fly. Since our odds looked good for flying we said good bye to the flip-flops and hello to our mountain boots. These bad boys would be our mode of transportation for the next few weeks. With the planes ready for us we began shuffling our gear to the planes. Excitement rushes through you as you walk across the tarmac knowing the moment is here. Next stop the Kahiltna glacier. Seatbelts buckled, headphones on, and the smell of the engine signals its time to fly. The views are so beautiful one can not put it into words. Huntington, Foraker, Hunter, peak 11,300 and many more awe-inspring peaks keep us wide eyed and trigger happy on the camera. After a loop up the Kahiltna showing what we will walk on tomorrow we descend into basecamp with a bumpy landing. It's a quick fire line to move the gear from the plane to the glacier before watching our ride fly away. We are on our own now. We decided to bump down to the lower airstrip which gave us practice pulling the sleds. The team is in tip top shape. Once camp is set up we enjoyed some down time followed by a refresher on skills. Some gear sorting and deciding what hot drinks to bring on the mountain led us into our pizza party dinner. Why eat mountain food when you can fly on pizza! It's an early to bed for us since for the next few days we will be on the night schedule, walking during the cool part of a day.  

Tomorrow is the day we take our first steps toward our goal of the summit. Here's to a great journey!

RMI Guides Hannah, Kiira, Dan and Team

Thursday, June 15, 2023 - 9:07 pm PT

Good evening and welcome back to The Bond Girls Late Night blog, where you get all your juicy mountain deets and feats. Today we woke up to the most astonishing scene of Hunter and Foraker, something this resident Alaskan only sees from time to time from the Fred Meyer parking lot. For almost all of us, it was a frigid night, you can bet for night two at 14,000' some of us will be breaking out the toe warmers. As the sun rose this quickly changed. We ate a big breakfast of bacon and crème cheese bagels and got on the move down to our cache at 13,500'. After about an hour and 40 minutes we were back at our new base camp, where we enjoyed some stretching, field baths, trashy realty tv and naps.

Please see below for all of our members and their spirit animals deemed by me:

Katherine - Tucan / Mongolian horse

Linhardt - earth worm (healthy) / Guinea pig

Joey - clownfish / stink bug

Andy - black footed ferret / sting ray

Scott - eel / camel

Stephan - porcupine / platypus

Andy (guide) - sloth bear / manatee

Jeff - musk ox / horn toad

Jack - north Texas hare / anteater

Steve -  pigeon from Italy / moose

Mikayla - gull / sewer rat

Kevin - warthog / Airedale

Shout out to my girl Mack who’s completing a tour oversees here soon, and to all of my friends and family who helped and inspired me to get here.

PS Alex I know your birthday is in July I was just delusionally tired when I wrote that last blog lol.

Signing off for now, Mikayla (Pony Rider / Goldie Locks) and the rest of the girls!

Hello this the Dhaulagiri team. We are at the end of our fifth day of our approach to base camp at a location called Italian Camp. We are roughly at 3,700 meters. Everything has been pretty good so far. We have had really good weather on the approach. A couple of snow storms at night. The sunshine at this camp is baking us right now. We are about to have a pretty good meal here. We would like to share also that on the approach, we had a really cool encounter in one of the villages. We shared some of the supplies that we gathered over the last year from supporters who have been pitching in to bring us here. So that was really neat to share these items with a village on our way to Dhaulagiri. Everything is well like I said. We have about two or three more days to get into Base Camp from where we will be checking in once we arrive. So we hope all is well and we will keep you posted. Bye. RMI Guide Elias de Andres Martos

Hello from the Dik Dik Hotel, We had an early wake up call at Mweka camp this morning and were on the trail by 8:00 am. It was blue skies leaving camp then we descended into the cloud forest and had the first rain of the trip. Even though we had a long summit day yesterday, the team was very motivated and made great time walking down to the park gate. We said our goodbyes to all the support staff that helped us climb Kilimanjaro and then loaded up the bus to head back to the Dik Dik. After being greeted by a glass of champagne, we headed immediately for a well deserved hot shower. We just finished our celebration dinner and will re-pack our bags once again, but this time, it is for a new adventure - our safari that starts tomorrow. First stop is Lake Manyara, most well known for it's tree climbing lions. We will let you know if we are lucky enough to see one. Cheers, The Kili Team

Saturday, May 25, 2024 - 4:39 pm PT

Well, today didn’t go as planned but it was still a helpful day on our journey to reach the summit of Denali. We woke to high winds above us, deemed it too windy for a safe summit attempt and chose to take a rest day at 17,000' Camp. The sun came out this afternoon and we all enjoyed sitting outside our tents resting, hydrating and taking in the views.
All the guide teams are working together up here and Mike lead a crew of guides up the Autobahn (a long stretch of climbing right out of camp) this afternoon. They checked out conditions and put in work shoveling and digging out pickets so that it’s in good shape for tomorrow.

We are all watching the weather closely and so hopeful tomorrow will be our summit day.

Here we go!

RMI Guides Jess Wedel, Mike Walter, Michael Murray and the Denali team